Job of Uz Told Pharaoh to Kill the Hebrew Boys

The Egyptians came back to Pharaoh a second time, and they were sweating. The Hebrews had gone on multiplying under the hard labor instead of thinning out under it, until the land was as full of them as a field is full of thick underbrush, because the women were bearing several at a birth. "They are everywhere," the Egyptians said, "and all this work is not slowing them down."

Click for full size

Pharaoh had nothing. He had spent his one idea on the bricks, and now his own men were standing in front of him waiting, so he turned to his counselors and asked them what they thought. A king who has to ask that question in a full room is a king in trouble.

The Counselor from the Land of Uz

One man rose. He had come from Uz, in Aram-naharaim, and his name was Job.

He opened by praising the plan that had failed. The burden of work the king invented was good in its time, he said, and it should go on being carried out from here forward. Nobody in the room had to lose face. Then he named the thing under the complaint, which was not bricks at all but a war. If fighting came, the Hebrews were numerous enough to overwhelm Egypt and chase the Egyptians out of their own land.

Then he said the rest of it. Let the king issue a decree that every male child of the Israelites shall be killed at his birth.

Nobody interrupted. Pharaoh had walked into that room without a plan and was walking out with one, and relief is quicker than arithmetic, so the relief arrived before the sentence did. Boys only. No soldiers in the quarter, no burning, nothing that would stop the brick count for a single day. The girls would grow up under Egyptian roofs, and in twenty years there would be no arm in that whole people to lift a spear.

The Part That Needed Hands

Job was not finished, because a decree is only a sentence until somebody carries it. Now let the king summon the Hebrew midwives, he said, and let him command them in accordance with this plan.

So the entire weight of it came down on two pairs of hands, and the hands belonged to women who were not in the room and had not been asked. A counselor can draft the end of a generation in four sentences. He cannot reach into a birthing room and make a woman's fingers close.

How That Throne Had Been Filled

Egypt understood exactly what it was proposing, because Egypt counted its own sons with enormous care.

An earlier king of that land lay dying while his flesh gave off a stench like a carcass thrown into a field in the heat of summer. He had made his arrangements years before. His second son, Adikam, had been given a wife at ten years old, Gedidah the daughter of Abilat, and she bore him four sons; then Adikam took three more wives and got eight more sons and three daughters off them. So when the sickness finally seized the old king by the throat, there was no gap for the crown to fall through. He sent for the boy, and they made him king over the land in his father's place.

That was the machinery of the house that heard Job speak. Wives assigned, sons stacked up, a crown carried across a sickroom before the body cooled. Men who arrange their own next generation that carefully know the value of what they are taking when they empty another man's house of its boys.

The Name Moses Asked For

Years later a man who had run away from that same throne stood in front of a bush that burned and would not go out.

Moses had one request before he would go back. He wanted the Great Name, because he knew the children of Israel were going to ask him who had sent him, and he did not want to be standing in front of a nation of slaves with nothing in his mouth.

What he got was not a password. "My Name is according to My acts," God told him. When I judge My creatures I am called Elohim. When I rise up to do battle against sinners I am Lord of hosts. When I wait with long patience for the improvement of a sinner, My name is El Shaddai. When I have mercy upon the world, I am Adonai.

Then the answer turned away from the palace entirely and pointed at the slave quarters. But to the children of Israel, God said, you shall say that I am He that was, that is, and that ever will be, and He that is with them in their bondage now, and He that shall be with them in the bondage of the time to come.

Moses had asked for a name big enough to carry into Pharaoh's court. He was handed one that already knew there would be another bondage after this one.